Tag: CERN

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Antimatter and the Cosmic Coin Toss

I have been thinking about antimatter again. In June 2026, Elon Musk wrote on X that “a trillion times a trillion dollars” would one day be spent making antimatter to travel to other star systems, and NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman answered that he supports antimatter propulsion. I added my own two cents: aluminum was once rarer and more expensive than gold, until the right process and cheap energy made it abundant. Antimatter may follow a similar path. It is insanely expensive today, but history shows these patterns can repeat themselves, even if it takes centuries.

It is strange when you really stop to think about it. Every particle we know has a twin: same mass, opposite charge. The electron has its positron, the proton its antiproton. They are remarkable mirrors of one another. When they meet, they do not push or argue. They simply disappear together, turning their mass into a burst of energy. It is Einstein’s equation coming alive in one of the most spectacular ways nature allows.

I remember reading the old papers years ago. Dirac’s equation of 1928 already hinted at these shadow particles, and in 1932 Anderson caught a positron in a cloud chamber, in the tracks left by cosmic rays. It felt like the universe had decided to share one of its quiet secrets with us.

But one question never quite leaves me. If the Big Bang created nearly equal amounts of matter and antimatter, as many of our best theories suggest, where did all the antimatter go? Why is the universe we can see and touch made almost entirely of ordinary matter?

It is as if creation flipped a coin that landed ever so slightly in matter’s favor. We still do not fully know why. Teams at CERN produce tiny amounts of antihydrogen and hold it in magnetic fields so delicate that the slightest contact with ordinary matter would erase it in an instant.

Without that ancient imbalance, none of this would exist. No stars. No planets. No oceans catching the light at sunset. No one standing beneath the night sky, asking why the universe turned out this way. The simple fact that we are here means matter got to stay.

It always brings me back to the feeling I have when I look back at Earth from out here: a fierce, protective tenderness for our little blue world. It survived whatever that cosmic coin toss was. It got to become home.

What do you think, Samayans? When you look up at the night sky, do you ever feel there might be more to the story than what we can see right now?

Stay curious. Keep wondering.

Samafully,
Max Von Sama


First published on X by @MaxVonSama. Read the original article on X.

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Higgs boson may be a reality!

So exciting! This morning I’ve read the news everywhere on the Internet:

The ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN today presented their latest results in the search for the long-sought Higgs boson. Both experiments see strong indications for the presence of a new particle, which could be the Higgs boson, in the mass region around 126 gigaelectronvolts (GeV).

Can you imagine how it would change our understanding of the Universe? Amazing!

You can visit CERN website and for the non-specialists, read this article. You can also read Max Dana’s post about it, she is even more excited than me about the Higgs boson!

A proton-proton collision event in the CMS experiment producing two high-energy photons (red towers).
This is what we would expect to see from the decay of a Higgs boson
but it is also consistent with background Standard Model physics processes. © CERN 2012

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Neutrinos can’t beat speed of light

It is now official: neutrino researchers admit Albert Einstein was right.

Mark Brown, Wired UK, writes:

Back in September 2011, a team of particle physicists detected neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light as they traveled from CERN to the Gran Sasso lab. They smashed the universal speed limit by 60 nanoseconds — a result that was constant, even after 15,000 repetitions of the process. The results seem to run counter to a century’s worth of physics and would overturn Einsten’s special theory of relativity if true. As such, CERN called for more experiments to double-check the findings.

[…] At the International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto on June 8, CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci presented results on the travel time of neutrinos from CERN to the INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory, on behalf of four experiments — Borexino, Icarus, LVD and Opera. All four experiments measured a neutrino time of flight that was below the speed of light, confirming that neutrinos respect Einstein’s cosmic speed limit. The previous anomaly was “attributed to a faulty element of the experiment’s fibreoptic timing system.”

If you don’t get why it would have been a big deal to prove Einstein’s theory wrong, a news on The Guardian explains it all:

Travelling faster than the speed of light goes against Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity. If it were possible, it would open up the troubling possibility of being able to send information back in time, blurring the line between past and present and wreaking havoc with the fundamental principle of cause and effect.

 Now we know where we stand.

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Digital artist creates new kind of experiment at CERN

I read this news last month and I’m eager to know more about what kind of creative work artist Julius von Bismarck, the winner of the Collide@CERN prize, will present on his experiences at the laboratory in September.

From the article published by Symmetry Breaking Magazine:

If attendees at the welcome reception for CERN’s first artist-in-residence learned one thing last night, it was that Julius von Bismarck is not afraid to disrupt others with his art. In a way, this trait puts him right at home with CERN scientists: the kind of people who always question, the kind of people who fill an auditorium to discuss the possibility that a long-held law of physics could be broken. But von Bismarck is not a CERN scientist. So inviting him into the laboratory, where he will stay for the next two months, is a sign of trust – not that he won’t disrupt the scientists, but that, if he does, the experience could be worthwhile […] Von Bismarck, 28, has used invention, experiment and, in many cases, the participation of an unsuspecting crowd to address questions about how we interact with the world around us. In 2006, he created a white, spherical helmet that blocks the wearer’s view of anything but a live video feed from a camera attached to a balloon overhead. “It totally changes your perception,” von Bismarck said. At last night’s reception, he showed a video of himself walking through Berlin’s central train station wearing the contraption. “After a while you get used to it,” he said. “What never goes away is the shakiness. The world is losing stability.”

Art and science, isn’t that exciting?!

Physicist James Wells with Julius Von Bismarck, CERN’s first artist in residence.
Image: CERN